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I Read 350 Pages of Conspiracy Theories in 3 Days. Here’s What I Learned
Ever since the assassination of JFK, Texas has been prime real estate for plots, ponderings, and general hokum, so I was not surprised to find what I hoped would be my new favorite book wasting away in a Houston antique store. The Conspiracy Reader is an anthology of articles from Paranoia Magazine, a long-running zine that began in the early ’90s and worked as one of the most prominent means of conspiracy theory dissemination in America, before 9/11 and Loose Change’s wide availability on the internet would mainstream such ideas.
One of the things that made Paranoia unique was its totally egalitarian editorial approach: if editors Al Hidell and the pseudonymous Joan D’Arc thought you could explain your idea with a decent level of consistency, they’d publish it no matter how baffling or far-fetched it came across. This open door policy obviously lead to some pretty insane nonsense, but it also resulted in genuinely excellent journalistic pieces about subjects like the Philadelphia MOVE bombing. If you wanted to cover something the mainstream media wasn’t touching, and if you could write reasonably well, Paranoia would let you have the floor, and this made the magazine a fascinating petri dish for observing how the minds of those with fringe beliefs work.
